Have nothing to do with the [evil] things that people do, things that belong to the darkness. Instead, bring them out to the light... [For] when all things are brought out into the light, then their true nature is clearly revealed...

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, October 19, 2016:

Coat of Arms of Saudi Arabia

Oil ministers from Saudi Arabia have been traveling the world doing investment “roadshows” to promote their $10-billion bond offering that hits the markets this week. In so doing, they must disclose the risks investors could be taking, and then price the bonds according to those risks.

The Saudis appear to be paying the price for losing their bet about American oil producers. In November 2014 they made a massive wager that they could

The headline number from Friday’s jobs report was a tepid 156,000 new jobs created in September. Not only did this number fall short of economists’ expectations of 170,000, it was 19-percent below the average job growth of the last three months and 22 percent below the level of monthly job growth of 229,000 in 2015.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency reporting from inside the Labor Department, was none too sanguine itself in reporting the results:

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, September 9, 2016:

One of Hanjin’s container ships looking for a place to unload.

When the question about a tree falling in the forest is asked, it’s usually posed as a philosophical one: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” The question is never asked: “What if someone is around who doesn’t want to hear it?”

That appears to explain the kept media’s deafness over the state of the global economy. Even when the Wall Street Journal reported on the bankruptcy of Hanjin Shipping, the world’s seventh largest container shipping company, not one word was spent on asking why. Instead

Puerto Rico continued its “death spiral,” with its failure to make a $422 million interest payment on Monday on some of the island’s gigantic $73 billion debt. This comes on the heels of missed payments over the last year, and will be followed up by a $2 billion payment due on July 1, which it is also widely anticipated to miss. The payment is due from the island’s Government Development Bank (GDB), the main bond issuer and the island’s fiscal agent.

So far Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla (above) has, as noted previously in The New American, been able to keep the lights on and the water running by moving money around on the island’s balance sheet, paying only those with the highest and most enforceable claims and dealing as best he can with those holding lower credits. It was Padilla who said his island was in a “death spiral” as far back as last July, because his 3.5 million inhabitants, half of whom live in poverty, didn’t have the money.

But for decades Padilla and his predecessors acted as if they did have it,

To the consternation of traders short the market, crude has jumped from $30 a barrel in late January to over $40 currently, with many indicators pointing to still higher prices. Was $30 the bottom? What will be the new ceiling?

Every bull market rises from the ashes of fear, disgust and despair. Traders and investors reasonably expected oil to bottom at well below $30, perhaps in the 20s, with some heavyweights, including Goldman Sachs, suggesting even lower prices. Some took short positions, certain that their calculus was correct: OPEC had maxxed out, American production seemed impervious to precipitous declines in rig counts, China’s economy was faltering and signs of recession were continuing to expose themselves around the globe, including the U.S. What could go wrong?

A little energy company, Callon Petroleum, showed exactly what could go wrong. Three times in the last six months the company has sold new shares to raise equity, and three times the company’s stock has risen. Logic and experience would suggest that dilution of shares would reduce their price. But with Callon, shares jumped from $4.21 in the middle of January to nearly $10 currently.

Shouts of “Anybody but Dilma” resonated in Brazil’s lower house on Sunday as that body voted 367-137 to impeach President Dilma Rousseff. After the dust settles, that is very likely what they are going to get: a change in name only. The corruption and anti-capitalist policies will remain.

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, March 28, 2016:

English: Aerial view of Rio de Janeiro city center, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The latest numbers coming out of Brazil confirm what Goldman Sachs said last December: “What started as a recession … is now mutating into an outright economic depression, given the deep contraction of domestic demand.”

Translation: President Dilma Rousseff’s attempt to stimulate the slowing economy via massive insertions of new debt has in fact had the opposite result.

Consumers have cut back by more than eight percent across the board, while investment spending has declined more than 10 percent last year, with cumulative capital spending

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, March 28, 2016:

John Maynard Keynes

Boiled down to its most crude elements, Keynesianism, according to Antony Mueller at the Mises Institute, is “the economic policy doctrine of growth by spending.” Since 2003, when the current political party in Brazil, first headed up by Lula and now by Dilma Rousseff, came to power, it installed it in spades. For a while it seemed to work: demand for Brazil’s raw materials: oil, iron ore, and agricultural products grew as China (also pursuing the “growth by spending” mantra) also grew.

But the boom, which at one point included Brazil as one of the BRIC (Russia, India, and China) nations that would soon overtake the developed world, went bust.

In his article published by the Project Syndicate on Thursday, Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) revealed that he doesn’t understand voters’ anger manifesting itself in the unexpected success of candidates viewed as establishment outsiders such as Senator Ted Cruz and businessman Donald Trump.

He noted voters’ “considerable anxiety” and even their “outright anger” but cannot understand why they feel that way. After all, he said,

With crude oil up more than 30 percent over the last week, and companies like SeaDrill and Chesapeake Energy up 125 percent and 250 percent, respectively, over the last five days, short covering has persuaded some that the bottom is in. Investors, especially short sellers, in the oil patch need lots of risk capital, a high risk tolerance, and a short memory.

Buried in Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen’s comments to senators last Thursday were three revealing statements.

First: “There is always some chance of recession in any year. But the evidence [at the moment] suggests that expansions don’t die of old age.” Translation: Recessions result from inherent weaknesses in the system.

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, September 28, 2015:

President Dilma Rousseff

Brazilians are facing a bleak future. The combination of last week’s downgrade of the country’s government debt to junk, along with downgrades on the debt of many of its major industries, and the unfolding “Operation Car Wash” scandal at Petrobras (the massive government-owned oil company), all spell trouble for an economy already in decline.

Like flies attracted to honey, Brazilian politicians saw their opportunities and took them. Initially a money laundering investigation in Brazil focused on just one company, a manufacturer of electronic components that was being used by a criminal ring to hide and whitewash its illegal gains. The owner, Hermes Magnus, apparently discovered the activity back in 2008 and notified local police.

By March 2014 the investigation had spread to more than 230 individuals, including

Greek citizens shouted “No!” to further austerity measures for the hapless country in exchange for more of what got it into trouble in the first place: other people’s money. The lopsided 60-40 vote astonished telephone pollsters, who predicted a much narrower victory for Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras of the far-left Syriza party. Although the issues were far more complicated than the referendum made it appear, the 68-word ballot question made it easy: do you want more increases in taxes, more cuts in pension benefits, another increase in the VAT … or not? Translated into English, the ballot read:

This article first appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, June 22, 2015:

The announcement last week by Greece’s central bank that it may be forced to start implementing capital controls — eliminating the ability of Greeks who still have any money in the bank to withdraw it or send it to another country for safekeeping — may just be a ploy to bring more pressure on the Troika (European Central Bank, IMF, and eurozone countries) to release the last batch of funds from Bailout Number Three.

Withdrawals by nervous Greeks began last fall as Bailouts Number One, Two, and Three were only pushing the country further into recession. Withdrawal from the eurozone itself became increasingly likely, with the result that the euro would be replaced in Greece with a new currency with much less purchasing power.

Ever since Greece joined the European Community, later to be called the European Union, it has enjoyed far better credit ratings than it deserved. Assured that default was now no longer an option, central banks and other international financial institutions were more than willing to

This article was first published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, May 8, 2015:

Wolf Richter is one observer of the present world economic scene who hasn’t had his mind altered by drinking the Kool-Aid ladled out in Washington and in the economics departments of so many colleges and universities. After holding a number of C-level positions (CEO, COO, etc.) in large and successful private companies, he chucked it and went to live for a while in Switzerland. He started a blog with the ghastly name of Testosterone Pit, which he thankfully changed to Wolf Street last summer.

He has been watching economic events unfold (and unravel) in China for some time, but the latest from the Shanghai Containerized Freight Index (SCFI) so startled him two weeks ago that he thought it was either a misprint, or that the index would bounce right back from its precipitous fall.

On Monday – the same day that UAE’s Energy Minister Suhall al-Mazrouel said that OPEC was going to stick to its decision to keep pumping regardless of price declines – the same day that Goldman Sachs issued its negative outlook for prices – when crude oil prices dropped in response by 5 percent, hitting a six-year-low of $44.20 a barrel on Tuesday, the CFO of Canadian Natural Resources announced he was going to expand both its production and its output into 2015 and beyond.

Chief Financial Officer Corey Bleber was oblivious to the carnage, saying that his company expected its overall output for 2015 to be at least seven percent ahead of last year’s, and that it would continue

This article first appeared at The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, January 7, 2015:

Kingdom Centre, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Most prognosticators are concentrating on their understanding of economics to inform their predictions on how much lower crude oil prices can go. It’s a simple matter of supply and demand: supply is increasing, demand is decreasing (and it’s inelastic, to boot), so when demand meets supply – and “clears the market” as economists call it – crude will find a bottom.